Organization name: Betahaus
Sector: Coworking Spaces
Location: Berlin
ezeep Ambassador: Christoph Fahle, Co-Founder
Internet: https://www.betahaus.com/
Company
Betahaus is Europe’s largest coworking space, with locations in Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg and Sofia. A lighthouse location for the EU economic region’s emerging digital economy, Betahaus attracts a diverse array of international talent who come for the coworking space’s important cultural significance.
Betahaus believes in meaningful community connection, and actively hosts events that bring together entrepreneurs, professionals, politicians, members of the press and investors from around the world.
Challenge
Being a warm, trustworthy host for 400-600 guests every day is a wild social adventure that requires an enormous amount of infrastructural, administrative and organizational work.
Betahaus believes in being an amazing host and creating awesome community–where an easygoing vibe encourages people to connect and a professional atmosphere encourages collaboration that yields measurable business results. While the social side of this environment is richly rewarding, the organizational side of operations is always challenging. With 400-600 guests on a daily basis and a tight budget, print-management is the last thing Christoph and his team have time to worry about.
Solution
With so many new guests entering its doors, Betahaus used to spend hours a week setting-up printer drivers and improvising an invoicing system to cover printing costs. With ezeep, these complications are eliminated, and Betahaus is able to generate a side stream of revenue by charging for printing via ezeep.
What Christoph, Co-Founder, has to say about ezeep
In the digital age, printing should finally just work and be much easier than it is today. Downloading a printer driver off the Internet and installing on your machine? Sounds easy, but it isn’t. Multiply that number times hundreds of people filling in IP numbers and figuring out the network. It’s an absolute mess. If there are two things I hate in life, it’s printing and taxes. And, while Betahaus wishes we could offer free printing to coworkers and guests, it turns out that if printing is free, people might print-off one-thousand fliers for their punk band. The costs were getting insanely high. We tried setting-up an ad hoc system for tracking and charging for printing, and it took–literally–a week of work every single month.
ezeep is a straightforward solution–I don’t understand why every printer doesn’t come with a service like this built in. It solves a fundamental problem that nobody should have to deal with. ezeep solved an enormous pain. Everybody who drops-in to Betahaus can just go to ezeep.com and sign-in to access our printers. It’s that simple. Guests can also just buy credit to print directly from ezeep, and ezeep deposits this money directly into our account, generating an additional revenue stream for our business, which is so valuable to us. Printing should just work for everybody and be super-straightforward and simple. ezeep lets us do that.